hardware spec for large DB 2

[wekkew]

hi

have a series of dbs containing sport results and details that I've been collecting for many years now - getting on for close on 900,000 in total.

The data is a mess at the moment, some of it in .txt files, some on spreadsheets, some in tables - plan to bring it all together and tidy it up.

As I'm thinking of buying a new computer I want to make sure that I spec I get will have plenty of spare performance to cope with this db as it grows.

I was thinking of a an i5 370 + 8mb - would that be enough or should I go higher?
Also - is MSAccess going to cope?

thanks

 

[Golom]

... getting on for close on 900,000 ...

900,000 what exactly? Bytes? Records? Field Values? Files?

The answer makes a difference.

Usually a DBMS doesn't require massive compute (i.e. CPU) power and memory requirements have more to do with what you are doing with the data rather than its total volume in the DBMS.

If you are looking at enough data to push the 2 GB limit for Access then you may want to look at some of the more industrial strength DBMS offerings such as SQL Server or Oracle.

 

[fisheromacse]

After several projects involving convoluted data, i highly recommend SQLExpress over Access.

As Golom said, what you plan to do with the data will determine what specs you need. Pretty much any modern processor is going to be plenty powerful. Max out the RAM if you can, as database applications tend to grab all that they can, even if they are not necessarily going to use it.

 

[lameid]

MS Access in a single user environment copes well unless you are going to run into its 2 GB file size limit
(unless I am out of touch with the newer versions). If your data files are no where near that in total size, you should be more than fine. The how you use it does become important in runtime of queries. I am guessing however that for sports data you will not be doing anything too complicated with it and should be fine. As for SQL Express... 2008 R2 does give you 10 GB for databases and is free. On the otherhand it limits memory usage to 1GB and will only use a single core... Depending on what you are doing, Access may actually be faster.

When the others point out using other RDBMS (Oracle / SQL)it is important to note you will still need an interface for those. Access can serve as an interface for those.

In any case, an icore 5 with 8GB is probably overkill for this purpose. 4 GB should be more than plenty of RAM. And the icore 3 was the sweet spot for value when last I looked a few weeks ago. Naturally, when you start running a lot of different programs at the sametime, your requirements may vary... Unless you are going to use Office 2010, Access is only going to run on a single core anyway, so the faster the core speed not the number of cores is more important.

 

[jsteph]

wekkew,
If you're talking 900,000 records, Access should handle that fine...assuming the width of the record (# of fields * size of fields) isn't huge.

But in general that's fine with plenty of room for growth too.

Also, Access lends itself perfectly to what I'm guessing you'll be doing with it--that is if it's what I'd do with it--analysis, crunching, coming up with those off-the-wall statistics you always hear during games (ie, "this team has scored 23.5% of the time with 2 outs and 2 or more men on base when trailing in score after the fifth inning, on Tuesdays").

Those types of things are much easier (in my opinion) with the Access query grid and DAO rather than trying to do complex sql at a command line. And probably your best money would be spent on a very fast hard drive rather than a higher end processor.
--Jim

 

[lameid]

Excellent point about the HD Joe...

The DB performance in order of importance are likely...

1 HD Performance (consider seek time strongly <you'll probably only see RPM; Lower seek time is better, Higer RPM is better> as well as throughput)
2 Sufficent RAM (varies on OS, version of Access, database size)
3 Front Side Bus Speed
4 Processor Speed

Note that 3 and 4 are closely related but since databases are all about data I/O, the FSB is going to play a big factor.